I have what I believe to be click fraud happening on my Adwords account and so far Google has not taken any action. I have a couple of questions so I can gain information. They keep giving me "canned" answers and not really anything concrete. Here is what is happening. I am running locally targeted campaigns on the search network only for towing services. For the past 10 months I am getting click from the following IP: 150.70.84.77. If you run the whois you can see that it is from Japan. What is really strange is immediately before the click from this IP address I get another one from a different IP but the EXACT same keywords. This has been happening the same pattern for 10 months and about 6-10 clicks a month. So between the two of them it is costing me 20 clicks a month give or take. Up to this point Google refuses to credit me money or give me any advice as to how to prevent my ads from showing. I dont think you can block certain sites when you advertise on the search network. I use prosper 202 and only track my Google adwords landing pages. Here is my question: On Prosper they give you the referrer link. Is this link unique to the search query and the IP address that the click came from? Google told me that they dont have any records of the addresses that I am giving them. Thanks for everyone's help in advance.
You can link your Adwords account to Google Analytics. Analytics has a beta Adwords function which you can trace which ad was being clicked on, the ad that being served and the location of user who clicked the ad. If it shows the ad is being clicked from Japan but your campaign is targeted to somewhere else. Then maybe you can build a stronger case for Google to back trace. For referrer link, it may not be accurate enough. The referrer link can be generated by programming script.
Hey guy, you can use Site and Category Exclusion tool. This feature enables you to specify IP addresses where you do not want your ads to appear. Good luck to you !
You're probably just getting clicked on by a bot.. Is your eCPM going down because of this? If it's not, I wouldn't be too worried..
I think adwords is poo poo, compared to some other forms of advertising. I have people clicking all around the country (probably Google employees) when I only target one area. I too target local searches and sites. My best advice to would be to do this..shut down your adwords campaign and go over to http://www.gumtree.com/ - click on your local site post an ad and feature it. Gumtree rocks, 80% of my clients come through this site, it's pretty much guaranteed to pay off. Gumtree have given me over £1000 worth of jobs in the last 3 weeks and it didn't cost me a penny! stuff pantswords...
2.00 is my AVG cpc. The money is not what bothers me. It is the fact that they are just blowing me off. These are clearly bad clicks and they refuse to do anything.